Are Facebook ads worth it?

Friday 10th July 2015

Every time I post a new blog, Facebook hassles me to Boost this post so I thought it would be interesting to see whether it makes any difference to how many people read my blog. I'm not that bothered about actually increasing my readership, but I'm curious to see what happens.

At the beginning of May I wrote about an experiment to find out who I should vote for in the general election.

So I gave Facebook £15 and told them to promote my post for 3 days, so £5 per day. Facebook estimated that it would show my post to 2,200 to 5,900 people. Apparently 13 of my friends have boosted a post too, if you're one of them please leave a comment at the end of the post!

After three days, it gave me some pretty stats. The image below shows the number of people reached. Facebook showed the post to 8,086 people (more than they estimated), roughly 50/50 male to female, mostly in the 18-24 age range and overwhelmingly using mobile devices.

The next image shows engagement - the number of people who actually clicked on the post. Out of those 8,086 people only 62 clicked on it: a 0.77% click rate. It's still split pretty evenly between male and female, still mostly 18-24 and entirely on mobile. There is however a spike in the 45-54 age range too - maybe this age bracket is more interested in politics?

Finally,it gave me a summary of the costs to attract each of the clicks. This is interesting, it cost me 25p per female click but only 22p per male click. Clicks from the 18-24 age range are 19p each but a whopping 53p from the 45-54 age group. Why are these people so much more expensive to target?

I was expecting a lot more for my £15; 62 clicks and just two likes seems very expensive.

Have you ever tried Facebook advertising, and did it work? Leave a comment below.